The branch notice that said too much
You are finalising a branch notice before it goes up on the board. The draft reads: "All customers are hereby informed that the branch will remains closed on 31 March 2025 for annual closing of accounts. Having completed the half-yearly audit, the counter timings has been revised with effect from 1 April. Customers are requested to not visit the branch on that day and to use net banking instead. The new timings are 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekdays. We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience caused." The manager wants the notice corrected for grammar and made readable in one pass, without changing any of the facts it states. Nothing may be added to, or removed from, the information about the closure date or the new timings.
1. Identify every grammatical error in the draft and give the corrected form of each.
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Three real errors, one of them arguable:
- 'will remains' → 'will remain'. A modal verb takes the bare infinitive; the -s belongs to a simple present, not to a modal construction.
- 'the counter timings has been revised' → '…have been revised'. 'Timings' is plural, so the verb must be plural. If the branch prefers the singular, it must write 'the counter timing has been revised' - but not 'timings … has'.
- 'requested to not visit' → 'requested not to visit'. Grammatically defensible either way, but a formal notice keeps the negative particle before the infinitive; 'to not visit' splits the infinitive and reads as conversational.
Everything else - the date, the reference to the audit, the net-banking advice - is grammatical and should not be touched. The task is correction, not rewriting of content.
2. The sentence beginning 'Having completed the half-yearly audit…' is faulty. Explain what is wrong and rewrite it so that the same information survives.
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It is a dangling participial phrase. An introductory '-ing' clause silently takes as its subject the subject of the main clause, which here is 'the counter timings'. The sentence therefore says, absurdly, that the timings completed an audit.
Two clean repairs:
- Make the doer the subject: 'The branch has completed its half-yearly audit and has revised the counter timings with effect from 1 April.'
- Or keep the passive and expand the phrase: 'After the half-yearly audit was completed, the counter timings were revised with effect from 1 April.'
The first is better for a notice because it names who acted, which the passive version hides.
3. The notice is also badly ordered. State which sentence should move, where it should go, and why its present position misleads the reader.
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The sentence 'The new timings are 9:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. on weekdays' is stranded. It arrives after the instruction to stay away on 31 March, so by the time the reader reaches the new timings he is still thinking about the closure day, and it is unclear which day the timings apply to.
Move it so that it sits immediately after the sentence announcing the revision, making one block: revision of timings + what the new timings are. Then the closure date + the net-banking instruction. Then the apology.
One further consequence: the apology currently appears to apologise for the new timings. Once the timings detail is pulled up next to the revision, the apology attaches unambiguously to the 31 March closure. If the manager is willing to depart from a single notice, the timings announcement is a genuinely separate message and belongs in its own notice.